Friday, May 27, 2016

My Father's Sayings

I have had several staff members ask me to spend some time writing down some of the sayings that I use all the time when dealing with a variety of patient issues. Many of them have been refined over a period of years but the vast majority of them are based on my life’s experiences both with my family as a child and with my substantial experiences in dental school. With that in mind, I thought I would do several blogs regarding some of those old sayings. I think I will start with several of my father’s old sayings who was an engineer and not a dentist but several of his sayings are applicable to dentistry.


The first one and probably my favorite is that “You pay for the inadequacies of your youth as you get older.” This is very true in dentistry.  If you have cavities when you are young and you have to have fillings done, most likely you will eventually have to have additional restorative procedures accomplished on those teeth as you age. If you have gum problems when you are young those will definitely haunt you in older age as your ability to heal decreases and gum problems become more progressive.  This reminds me of the 2nd saying which was “the Lord wastes good healing on the young as they don’t appreciate it”.  Once again, if you have gum problems when you are young the healing capabilities that you have as you get older decrease and periodontal problems increase. You can certainly deal with this problem with great oral hygiene but it is always going to be an issue. The next quote which I oftentimes find humorous and I relate a patient at least once a day was my father’s comment to me “Mark, you can have one or two things in life. You can either have children or almost everything else you ever wanted.”  Fortunately, my father and mother picked children otherwise I would not be here. I chose children and I think for our future children are an extremely important portion of our lives and the future of our country. I will be doing more quotes from my father and from my dental school experiences in future blogs. See you in my next blog.


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